OBSERVATIONS / RECOLLECTIONS / STORIES

Crackers and Their Kin

In 1992, I discovered The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, published a few years earlier by the University of North Carolina Press. Marvelous book, fascinating insights and information. I gleaned the following from Chapter 16, “The Mythic South.”

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May 12, 1992.

The word “cracker” is among the oldest descriptions of white Southerners, especially those from South Georgia and North Florida. The term extends back at least to the mid-1700s, when it was used in Scotland as a colloquialism for “boaster.”

By the 1760s, the word was commonly used to designate Scotch-Irish frontiersmen in the South.

The “redneck,” whose image looms large in the news media and popular culture, is any white Southerner in the lower or working class — so named for the perpetual sunburn he exhibited from toiling in the fields.

From the very beginning, when white colonists settled along the Virginia, Carolina and Georgia coasts, the redneck was the average man in the South.

These were ordinary farmers, and they peopled the southern half of the North American continent, moving relentlessly west. They are the most British group by blood of any element of contemporary America’s population.

The present-day “good old boy” is described as blue collar and usually conservative — a “man’s man.” He is somewhat self-centered and scheming, particularly toward out-groups, but to his in-group he is a loyal, affable comrade and a man of integrity.

Which naturally brings to mind “Goodfellas” and “The Godfather.”

Billy Carter, the brother of President Jimmy Carter and himself the essence of the type, defined a good old boy as someone who rides around in a pickup truck, drinking beer and putting his empties in a sack. A redneck, by contrast, tosses his empties out the window.